Michael Lewis Enters the Podcasting Game With ‘Against the Rules’

Storytelling is a hell of a skill. Michael Lewis has used it to make nonspecialist readers not just pick up but tear through books about baseball talent scouting, collateralized debt obligation and the intricacies of government bureaucracy. Lewis is famous because he makes people feel like they understand, however briefly, an overly complex world.

The author’s first foray into podcasting, the seven-part series “Against the Rules,” is about a subject that is, by his standards, only medium-wonky. It’s about authority, or “all the poorly refereed corners of life,” as he puts it. Lewis is interested in the current (sour) state of our relationship to authority and to regulation — our mistrust of them and, in some cases, our full-throated hostility toward them.

He focuses in each episode on a different profession, and somewhat awkwardly insists on calling all these professions “referees” to fit his rubric: financial regulators, experts on language usage, fine-art authenticators — “enforcers of rules and preservers of fairness.”

The common thread is a robust defense of these enforcers. Lewis says that pro-basketball officials, for instance (thanks to increased scrutiny of their work and the use of instant replay) are getting more calls right than ever before, even as they are vociferously attacked by fans and aggrieved players (especially the biggest stars). And he clearly believes, along with Elizabeth Warren, whom he interviews in the second episode, that the financial industry remains dangerously under-regulated.

Lewis grew up in New Orleans, and his voice, which retains the ghost of a southern accent, is an asset to him as a podcaster. He sounds both commanding and homespun. More important, his writerly voice, his way of concisely describing people and concepts, translates more or less intact to this format. Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “trusted his first impressions,” Lewis says. “Actually, that’s not quite right. He made a fetish of his first impressions.” In the middle of the episode about financial protection, after talking about issues like identity theft and the frustrating hurdles involved in managing student debt, Lewis laments “the total inability of anyone to solve anything.”

“Against the Rules” is produced by Pushkin Industries, the podcast company co-founded by Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg. It’s unclear about halfway through the show’s run — three of its seven weekly installments are online now — just how Lewis plans to connect the dots between the different types of agitation toward authority. He says early on that investigating this subject can tell us a lot about “the crisis that we find ourselves in.” President Trump says the system is rigged. So do Warren and Bernie Sanders. The privileged try to protect what they have by evading authority and regulation. The less fortunate feel strangled by red tape. Basketball fans think the refs have it in for their team, their stars. The teams and stars feel the same. Those paranoid in contradictory directions can’t all be right. Or can they?

If you’re used to reading Lewis’s books in silence, the accouterments that come with many podcasts will stick out more than they normally might. There are moments when it seems that the main difference between Lewis on this show and Lewis on the page is that a high-hat drum sometimes plays behind his voice on the show.

He partakes in some moves that are perhaps inevitable tools of the trade but still feel contrived. He coyly lowers his voice to conspire with listeners as key moments or twists arrive. He turns his reporting into drama starring himself — Michael Moore-ish moments such as when he is stymied trying to speak to someone at the offices of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

He interrupts his stories to read ads for Quip, an electric toothbrush, and for LinkedIn. There is probably no un-cringeworthy way to do this.

When he’s not pitching, he’s conducting interviews with experts, everyday people and high-profile sources such as Warren, Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr and N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver. But two unlikely cameos in the series are made by children. Near the end of the first episode, the one about N.B.A. referees, we hear a conversation that Lewis had with his son Walker after a youth basketball game. “He was calling the stupidest fouls,” Walker says of the game’s ref, before calling him a foul word.

Near the end of the second episode, we hear the voice of a young boy, the son of a woman trapped deep in the bureaucratic maw of student debt financing (so trapped and stressed that she’s losing her teeth because she’s grinding them so much). The boy reassures his mother, and he is, to use a scientific term, nuclearly cute.

These appearances by children, and the occasionally more syrupy tone of the show compared with that of Lewis’s books, does give me pause. Lewis is a persuasive speaker and the podcast is expertly produced. I’ll listen to the rest of this series and probably to any others he makes. But I’ll also hope that this move of his isn’t a meaningful data point in some larger cultural trend, and that he will keep doing what he does best, which is write books. He reads one ad for Audible, the audiobooks publisher, with a very personal inflection that incorporates his son Walker. He says that he and Walker listen to classics like “Gulliver’s Travels” and “Huck Finn” together. “It’s just fabulous,” Lewis says. “He’ll listen to things he would never read.”